The engineer looked behind Dong-Sun and identified the old shoreline with water markings on boulders. She saw a line of survey stakes driven into the ground, showing where a couple of the missile silos would be installed. She marked up the layout drawing, adding notes for more stakes to those locations.
When dusk finally arrived, Jenny began to make her move. She placed the plans on the ground and used large rocks to keep the wind from rolling the plans back up. Then she waved the guard over and asked him to take a look at the layout on the plans and the shoreline across the lake. As she pointed to the buildings around the rim of the lake, she showed the structures on the plans with the piers extending out into the dried lakebed. The guard looked over at the buildings, and then down at the plans, and then back again. As he studied the rim of the lake, Jenny lifted a heavy rock, raised it over her head, snuck behind him, and smashed the guard in the back of the skull, knocking him out cold, if not killing him, Cain and Abel style.
His slackened body collapsed on the plans; rills of blood dripped over the blueprints.
Jenny tossed Kim Dong-Sun’s hat toward the edge of the lake, suggesting she went missing in the water. Adjusting her eyes to the darkness, she backtracked her footprints to mislead those who found the guard that something bad happened to her, too.
At the edge of the parking lot, Jenny scanned the other side of the new base building for people — clear — while moving furtively toward the cars. With only two light poles installed, she needed to stay out of the lights to find a vehicle to snatch.
Jenny picked up her pace. She read about the history of bank robbers, how many who were successful planned little, taking only the risk to show up and improvise — which often caught the police in a different location, unable to respond. She took the same now-or-never approach on timing, too; that no one would come looking for her or the guard for another hour; that no one would arrive at the base that night to witness her escape; and that no emergency or fire drill would empty the building with the Revolutionary Guards Corps and missile scientists spilling out into the parking lot while she made off with one of their vehicles.
Timing and luck would play a pivotal role in aiding her escape.
Along the back of the parking lot, she combed the vehicles, hoping that the base didn’t have some strict policy on turning in the keys to the security personnel until it was time to leave. Jenny stayed low, sliding from car to car, pulling at locked door handles, peeking inside to see what tools or equipment she could steal. By the fifteenth or so car, she had found all the doors were locked and, other than a few Iranian newspapers and food wrappers in the front seat, the cars were empty, not worth breaking into.
Half dozen cars later, Jenny found an unlocked door. She slinked inside and searched for keys under the visor, no; under the seat and floor mat, no; and in the glove box, no. It too was empty. So she pried open the plastic housing of the ignition, ripped the colored wires from the steering column, leaving the neutral wire dangling, and hot-wired the car, starting the engine. She put the car in reverse, lifted the break, feathered the clutch, and rolled backward, eyeing the gas tank. She was in luck: There was half a tank of gas to travel over the mountainous roads, some washed out to a single lane in the lowlands and some bedded with gravel. She had enough fuel to take a one-way ride to the Iraqi border and on to the ISIS-repelled town of Erbil, where she would rendezvous with the Kurdish leader Behar.
Without fanfare, CIA clandestine operator Jenny Myung King left the world of Kim Dong-Sun behind. She drove by the under-construction and unmanned guardhouse. Unarmed, except for maybe a tire-iron in the trunk, she felt naked, exposed, but full of relief.
Driving west on Iran Route 26 took Jenny down through the mountains to Iran’s Kurdish-inhabited border city of Piranshahr. There she had a CIA asset that could drive her across the border to meet Behar. And when Jenny made it across the border without firing a single shot, she had a story to tell her “no gun” hero boyfriend Merk Toten how she accomplished the feat.
Jenny cracked the window and peered outside to the stars in the night sky.
She looked at her fingers gripping the steering wheel and eyed the black splatter dots and black streaks coating them. It was the blood of the Iranian Guard. The night was calm.
Chapter Sixty
Under the giant canopy at Camp Lemonnier, the marines and the CIA and FBI agents joined the on-base SEALs, Merk, some of the NMMP team, along with the Azure Shell negotiators, Dante Dawson and Christian Fuller. They attended the twin memorial service for slain SEAL Commanding Officer Nico Gregorius and drowned Special Forces veterinarian Lt. Morgan Azar.
Their bodies were placed in flag-draped caskets, ready for the next day flight back to the United States via Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for final burial at Arlington Cemetery.
The Navy Marine Mammal Program team began planning the return of navy dolphins, Tasi and Inapo, Lt. Merk Toten, and half of the bioteam of biologists, technicians, assistants, and veterinarians to the United States, with the balance of NMMP staff being returned to Qatar for ongoing surveillance duties in the Strait of Hormuz and the lower Persian Gulf.
With moving closing words from a marine brigadier general on “sacrifice” followed by a solemn prayer given by the naval chaplain, the CIA agents and SEAL Lt. Commander Kell Johnston escorted Merk to the intel fusion center. A tall, well-groomed ONI attaché, dressed in navy white uniform, told Merk that the sea-mines planted near the Shining Sea were stolen from the last Iraq War, when the NMMP dolphins cleared mines from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers delta in the Persian Gulf in 2003.
Merk remembered the operation, since it was that mission that sparked his interest in navy dolphins as a member of SEAL Team Six. He had met the NMMP dolphin master who had trained the half dozen dolphins that were involved in the mine-clearing operation in the confines of the shallow waterway, where naval minesweeping craft couldn’t enter.
On the sea-mines planted around the container ship, Merk told the ONI attaché that the bombs planted on the starboard hull of the Blå Himmel were made by the Norwegian sniper, who was a diver familiar with oil rigs, undersea welding, tech dives, and marine engineering projects and inspections. In taking in the former SEAL’s observations, the ONI attaché asked Merk the relevance. He replied, “Not one device can be traced to al Qaeda, ISIS, Iran, Syria, Yemeni affiliates and offshoots, or the Somali pirates.”
Those words stopped the attaché cold. Merk and the others continued to the door, showed their ID badges, which were scanned by marine guards, who let them into the fusion center one at a time.
Merk sat down in front of the wall screen. The ONI attaché entered last and closed the door behind him. He fixed his eyes on the dolphin whisperer; Merk eyed him back, and said, “The new war is here, isn’t? This isn’t the Paris terrorist attacks or the bombing of a Russian plane over the Sinai.” The room fell silent. All eyes fell on Merk. “So I will break protocol.”
“Lt. Toten, what do you mean by that?” the Asian American CIA agent asked.
“We’re chasing a fenemy… a ‘faceless enemy,’” he began to explain. “Sure, we know who they are. They’re the usual suspects. Let’s tag them with blame. Al Qaeda, some splinter group in Africa or Yemen, AQAP, bin Laden’s offspring, the Taliban, al Nursa, ISIS butchers, Somali pirates, Syrian rebels, the Iranian Quds force. Call it that and their names will pop up.”
“Your point being?” the ONI attaché sitting next to Merk asked.
“What if the hydra-head was connected? A lead brain overseeing fringe elements?”